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Just like the fat caterpillar above, you'll be a beautiful butterfly in the animation industry in no time! That being said, I'm not acknowledging that I've reached the 'yoda' level of my animation skills. I just feel the need to share some tips I've learned over the years from some of my mentors and workshops and that I'm still learning. One thing about animation and probably all other skills is that it is a never-ending learning process. So gotta always 'Stay Humble & tolerant in accepting criticism & feedback'.Which brings us to our first tip of the day.

10 Tips to Improve your Animation Skills

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Accepting criticism & feedback. Truth be told, I don't like this part of the whole animation process. I find it hard for me to swallow criticism at times when I sometimes think that my animation didn't need changing. Probably the ego talking there. But yea, one of the tips to improve your animation skills is to accept criticism from the director even if it means that your whole scene sucks. Yeaps, you just gotta swallow it and think of how to improve from there. You'd be surprised that you may actually come up with something better than your previous take. So always stay humble, I know I'm trying...
Simple key poses first. This is very important to have the overall key poses nailed down. Having listened to the scene's soundtrack, making sure that the key poses hit on the correct intonation of the audio is very important. When you've nailed down the key poses, you can also get a rough idea of the overall emotions and execution of the scene. Which brings us to the next part.
Timing & spacing. Importance of timing your key poses. The timing of the lion creeping upon its prey and a sudden charge and leaping to finish off the deer. All needs to have proper timing and spacing of poses. After nailing the key poses from the previous tip, you may continue planning the speed from key pose A to key pose B. Planning the in-between poses are just as important as it will finalize your scene.
Observe real-world references. I probably will be telling you that this too is very important. Basically, every tip is important. This however, can be done daily and you would probably get used to it after awhile. Observing real-world references means you take a good look at the finest details of an object or things around you. Take for example, how the bird lands and hops on the pavement in search of food. Pecking it's tiny beak at a rubbish thrown by uncivilized people. And before it pecks, it blinks with every twitch of its head.
Record yourself. Don't get me wrong, I know you do like to record yourself doing whatever it is you're doing :P, hey, it could be good reference too! In the animation industry, sometimes the best examples are yourself. All you need is a camera to video yourself walking, running, fighting, jumping and these references can be used to animate your characters. Some studios do provide acting classes to their animators for this sole purpose, referencing.
Offsetting your keys. Okay, this is a little technical. Offsetting simply means that not all parts of your body move at the same rate of speed. When a girl with long hair twirls and stops, her hair would follow the twirl but stops at a much later time. This applies to all body parts. When a character is turning, the pelvis would lead then the chest follows.
Center of gravity. Make sure that your character is always balanced. Whether it is standing on flat ground or on a rough terrain, the body posture must be balance. This is one of the thing I've learned recently because of all the uneven terrains my scenes carry. I had to make sure the weight of the character is properly proportionate to support whatever pose it is in.
Lead with the eyes and eye darts. I've heard somewhere that your character have to blink every 2 second so it 'looks' alive. That is by far the worst tip ever given to any animator. You DONT blink for no reason and you most definitely don't have your eyes looking at a blank space. The eyes are the most important feature of facial animations because it directs the audiences to what you want them to see. Doing this right would deliver the right emotions to the audiences.
Animate with basic models. To animate well, you need a smooth running PC to be able to get a jist of the timing and overall animation of the scene. DO NOT turn on high quality viewports as it will waste your time playblasting the scene over and over again just to check timing. Keep character models at minimal polygon when animating. Even better if you hide the background and environment if it's not yet needed. This will allow you to animate without any lags. Some scenes can be quite heavy on the PC. If so, you can isolate your character and animate.
Study physics. Yes, you heard me right. Not to be a physicist but animators need at least the fundamentals of physics. You need to know what is momentum, inertia, impact and so on so forth. And because animation uses these as fundamentals, you need to know what comes after that heavy log crashes, or how long it takes for a car carrying 5 passengers to stop. Doesn't have to be precise but it needs to be believable.

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Whew! That's it! It ain't that hard now isit? I'm also constantly improving on all these tips daily and trying to be better. As long as you're you progress, no matter how little it is, it is still progress.

With that, I hope you find this guide useful or if you have any animator friends on Steemit, you can share this guide to them so we can all benefit from it!